


Shelter From the Storm

by warmommy



Category: Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Jealousy, Past Child Abuse, Possessive Behavior
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-02-22 02:25:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13157256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warmommy/pseuds/warmommy
Summary: This was a request fill for the following prompts: 3. “I’m not jealous.” and 28. “That’s almost exactly the opposite of what I meant.”“In a world of steel-eyed death, and men who are fighting to be warm, ‘Come in,’ she said, “’I'll give ya shelter from the storm’.”Hugo really, really does not want you to put on that dress.





	Shelter From the Storm

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! You can find this and a lot more at my tumblr, warmommy.tumblr.com!

  


Hugo made his protest of this entire situation and your involvement with it quite obvious. As you chose a dress, holding up different ones against your body to get an idea of how each would look, he got up, stomped around the room, lit a cigarette, and repeated this process over and over.

He finally popped when you chose the one with the lowest neckline.

"Who the fuck have you got to wear that for? Some fucking Nazis?" He scoffed and somehow made it a violent sound. He went right back to his circuit of angry pacing.

You smiled at your reflection in the mirror as you zipped the back. It was a nice dress, a pretty little black number that draped beautifully. Really, there was nothing wrong with it; even if a little revealing, it still looked more elegant than the others you had to chose from. It fit well, too. You turned this way and that to see how it looked and didn't startle when Hugo hit one of the ancient bedposts. 

"Good Lord," you said. "I  _love_  when you get jealous. Do go on."

"I'm not jealous!" he shouted.

You nearly smeared your lipstick across your face with your abrupt laughter. You heard him stomp up behind you quickly and raised an eyebrow at his reflection.

He jabbed a finger your way. "Even if I was, why would I not be? What are you not doing to provoke me?"

Now it was your turn to get pissy, and you spun around on him fast, a finger in his face, too. "First of all, I do what the fuck I want to do, understand?" His face hardened. "And secondly, it is not  _my_  fault that Raine won't let you go undercover with me, it is  _your_  fault, or have you forgotten the infamous incident of Lorraine?"

"I was protecting you!" Hugo near spluttered, indignant.

"No, you weren't. You were  _jealous_ , so you stabbed that poor kid in the kneecap and almost blew our whole fucking cover!"

" _That is_  protecting you! Goddamn it!"

"Okay, that's enough. You can't get any louder than this. And quit looking at me like I'm some sort of idiot for not understanding how stabbing some seventeen year old's kneecap is protecting  _me_. I'm actually quite grateful that, tonight, I can just do my job, rather than have to babysit you because you attack any man you think looks at me funny or talks to me without respect." You blotted your lipstick and moved away from the little table and mirror. "You're a jealous son of a bitch, and you are  _terrible_  at being in even a quasi-paramilitary group. Jesus. You just act, you won't listen to anyone--"

"No,  _that’s_  enough. No one ever told you that I don't have problems with authority. What, do you expect me to actually apologise to you for defending you and your honour?"

"Is  _that_  what you think you're doing?" Your eyebrows nearly hit your hairline, and your jaw actually dropped. With crossed arms, you shook your head. "I'll be with Wicki the whole time, and we have Donny and Omar for back up. You are going to  _stay here_ , Lt. Raine was very clear on that, and I agree with him."

Hugo crowded you. "Why do you want to be alone with him so badly?"

Now your amusement soured. "Hugo, if I wanted to fuck Wicki, I would be fucking Wicki. I--do--what--the--fuck--I--want. It's not my fault that you don't realise that you're the one I'm fucking, so you're the one I want. I understand not being happy with the situation, but you're going to have to be unhappy with the situation and keep it to yourself. No one wants to listen, and I definitely do not want to hear it again."

"I don't know if you're fucking him or not, why would it matter that you're fucking me?" The chair in front of the table toppled over and some of the wood splintered. "You lie about everything! Half of all your words are lies, the other half is swear words!"

Your arms fell akimbo. Anger and hurt battled it out inside you, and you couldn't decide if the burning in your eyes was caused by either one. You took a deep breath, released it slowly, and did not allow one single tear to fall. "The smart thing to do would be to leave this room."

"I'm not any more afraid of you than you are of me," Hugo sneered.

You slapped him then, hard enough to cause a fiery burst of pain to blossom in your palm. While he was stunned, you gave him another slap for good measure. "You call me a cheater and a liar, all in the same breath? Actually, I'm done fighting. This is done, we're through. Congratulations, Stiglitz. You worked  _so_  hard to push me in the arms of another man, and you finally did it."

"You're not doing that." His voice was deathly quiet, the way it was sometimes right before the knife came out and the stabby-stabs happened.

With bitter laughter, you reached blindly for your cigarettes off the table. You spoke as you lit one, the roll of tobacco bobbing on your painted lips. "And just what the fuck do you plan on doing about it? You're not my owner, and you turned a perfectly pleasant evening into a nightmare because you are so  _jealous_  and  _selfish_."

"I would do anything for you, kill for you, die for you." Hugo still talked in that voice that terrified everyone else. Everyone but you. "I am not selfish. I don't have to own you for you to be mine, and you  _are_  mine."

You shook your head and went on a quest to find your shoes, but Hugo wrapped his hand firmly, but not harshly, around your arm and pulled you to sit with him on the bed. He held you very still there, but he wouldn't do anything. Not that would hurt, anyway, and you did not have the inclination or patience to do the other things he wanted. You twisted and pulled, but he wouldn't let go.

"You lie about everything," he repeated, although he was no longer yelling. "You lie about not being hungry, you lied to your parents about me--"

"You read my fucking letter to my mother and father?" Your voice held all the incredulity in the world.

"Yes." If you were a liar, Hugo was compulsively and uncomfortably honest. He was. . .well, you didn't know what they called it, but were fairly certain there was a proper medical term for what all was wrong with him. "You told them you met a nice guy, which made me happy, but you went on to say that his name was Gerold and he was a nice Jewish boy. I know for a fact that there's no way you have any involvement with Hirschberg. You lied to them about me. I wanted to rip the paper to shreds."

"Hey, Gerold is a really nice Jewish boy and I'd be lucky to be with him, any girl would." Hirschberg got more than his fair share of ribbing sometimes, so you'd always been naturally protective of him. "What the hell do you want me to say to my parents, Hugo? 'Hey Mama and Papa, look at my big ol'  _German_  boyfriend! Doesn't he just look like Hitler's little Aryan wet dream? He was in the Wehrmacht, the German army that rounds up Jewish people and executes them in front of their whole families. Here's a clipping from the paper where he went on trial for murdering thirteen men'."

"I  _am_  German, I  _do_  have blond hair and blue eyes, I  _was_  drafted into the Wehrmacht, I  _did_  kill those men, and many men afterward, all with you by my side, telling me that you were so proud of me, and now you've shown me that was a lie, too." Hurt edged his voice. Hugo was angry a lot of the time, pissed off at being touched or talked to by almost anyone, but no one really had a chance of hurting him. It was a fucking awful thing to see, and it turned your heart inside out with guilt and frustration. He wasn't the type to cry at all, he probably just plain couldn't, and his whole face didn't exactly crumble or anything. Most people would just think he looked even angrier, but you knew.

 **“That’s almost exactly the opposite of what I meant.”**  You sighed and slouched. You placed one of your hands on top of his. He didn't move, not to violently shove you away, as he would most people, and not to get closer for more, as he normally did with you. He wouldn't look you in the eye, either. You looked and saw the red imprint of your hand still on his face and felt even worse. "Look. I  _am_  proud of you, and I'm proud that I'm the one you'd kill or die for, not that I want you to do either. You cannot sit there and delude yourself, thinking that it's going to be just super swell and easy to get my Jewiest-Jews-That-Ever-Jew'd parents sold on the idea of me being with someone with your background. They're not going to look at your history and who you are, they're going to hear 'Germany', 'Wehrmacht', 'killed thirteen men', and think that they have to protect their little girl from this horrible Nazi. It is  _not_  personal. It has nothing to do with how I love you."

Hugo still didn't talk, and he  _was_  frowning more, but he leaned over against you, knees tucking in. This was the Hugo Stiglitz that no one else had ever seen before. You ran your fingers through his closely-cropped hair and watched his face while his mind worked through what you had said. Bit by bit, he grew closer, more attached, until his whole body was practically wrapped around yours. You smiled sadly and started to stroke his back.

The truth was, and you knew, because Hugo had told you himself and never lied, that you were the first person to offer him a shred of real affection in his entire life. His first memories all came from the orphanage he had lived in, and he was thrown from place to place, none of which ever wanted him. Sometimes the things he told you just as asides, casually, as though they were normal or common, gave you nightmares. Sometimes he told you things that made you plunge into a deep sadness, and you had to focus on keeping a straight face. If you cried, he would leave, ashamed and angry.

> _“I thought it was strange that the babies never cried. The staff took care to feed them and bath them and change them, but they just left them alone in their cots afterward. Nobody read stories to them or sung them songs or even touched them. When I was, pfft, I don't know, six, I went into their room and looked inside one of the cots. It was a baby girl, I think, and she was staring at her hands. I stood there for a while, and she was awake, I knew, and she just kept staring at her hands. Nobody loved them, like me, and I realised I had been one of those babies, too, staring at my own hands in a cot for twelve hours a day for the first year or so of my life."_

All night, after that story, while Hugo slept still as a stone beside you, you couldn't sleep, thinking of the poor babies, of little Hugo. The maternal instinct within you was so strong that your arms practically itched to hold all of those skin hungry babies from so long ago, to make them laugh and smile. You spent the whole night wondering how many of those babies had lived past the crib, and how many of them were still alive now.

That was a long time ago, though. Once he'd come around and opened himself up to receiving simple, affectionate touches, he never got enough. There was never, ever enough, he was so starved for it. No one else ever saw, not because he was ashamed, but because of how deeply private he was about his life. No one else ever saw this big man, this volatile, bloodthirsty, dangerous man, press himself against you and close his eyes as he felt your embrace or just rubbing his back, like you were now.  

"I'm sorry that I said we're through," you said quietly, and watched, transfixed, as he let out a huge breath and became half as tense as he had been. "We're not."

"You are my favourite," he said after a while.

"Hm? Favourite what?"

He shrugged, still staring ahead at the wall. "My favourite."

"Repetition is not explanation."

Again, he shrugged. "You are my favourite."

Well, being honest to a fault still didn't mean anyone could expect a straight answer from him. He told the truth as he could tell it.

Most of the time, he struggled with words. He still struggled to give back as much as he took. He struggled with insecurity, so much so that he was a very jealous man indeed. He struggled with the fear of you, his safe, warm place where he  _belonged_ , slipping through his fingers. For a while, that had meant ignoring you for a period of time, then coming back wanting forgiveness and to be loved, then cold again, a cycle you’d grown bored of. It took him a while to get back on your good side after the last time, and it  _was_  the last time.

"Hey." You scratched his shoulder to get his attention. "You're my favourite, too. My only favourite, my favourite only."

Looking up from his position, his face held only traces of curiosity, and perhaps a little of the mistrust ingrained into his very soul by thirty years of cruelty. "Only?"

You held his face in your hands and kissed him. "Now you're wearing lipstick." You winked. "I have to go now."

He shook his head. "I don't want him to--"

"Hush." You kissed him again. "It's all an act. No one thinks the couple in the corner booth who can't get off of each other is listening in on their conversations. I'm going to come back with lipstick smeared on my face. So is Wicki." He was right, you told lies whenever you felt it would protect someone's feelings. You could also be honest, though.

"Absolutely not, never." Hugo shook his head and began to stand up. "If that's all that's required, I can eavesdrop on the Kommandant. I will go and speak with Raine."

With a soft smile, you pulled on his wrist. "This is a secret, what I'm about to tell you, okay?"

He looked a bit uncertain, but nodded.

You leaned in close to his ear. "Wilhelm is as gay as they come. He's not interested in me. It's--all--an--act. He's my friend. My homosexual friend. That's why this works. He's not going to be focused on me, he just has to appear as though that's the case. You. . .even if Aldo did let you go in his place, you would be driven to distraction in a minute." Against his skin, you grinned. "I'm going to make out with a forty year old gay man like we're a pair of teenagers, order a coffee, smoke a few cigarettes, and he's going to be listening."

"Oh." Hugo frowned and looked up from his shoes. "But you told me that if you wanted to be fucking Wicki, you would be fucking Wicki. How could you have done that if he's a homosexual?"

"I made my point, damn!"

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! You can find this and a lot more at my tumblr, warmommy.tumblr.com!


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